For this heart to be unbroken
by cyanspark
Summary: Bucky tells himself that what he has with Steve is enough. Asexual Bucky/Steve and a lot of pining.


_Author's Notes:_ Basically, one day I woke up with a lot of unrequited romantic asexual Bucky feels, and this was the result.

I wrote this before _Captain America: The Winter Soldier _came out, so while it's based on the MCU it diverges pretty heavily from it at certain points.

Thanks for reading!

* * *

Bucky wonders if what he's feeling is a sin.

But then, he's heard men talk about what they fantasize about doing to women, and though he has no clue what the equivalent would be for two men, he's pretty damn sure he has no desire to do it. All he wants to do is run his fingers through Steve's hair and just hold him close and listen to him breathe.

He's not sure when it started. Was it the first time they met, when he saved that tiny boy from bullies who were twice his size, and saw something in those blue eyes that made him stick around? Was it when Steve started talking about his parents, and though his eyes were still bright with grief, he said he wished he could be half as courageous as they were? Was it when he saw Steve always sharing what he had, no matter how little it was, and smiling that smile of his that seemed to make the entire room brighter?

Bucky doesn't remember. All he knows is that he'll lash out in a fury when he sees Steve getting bruised and bloody, he'll drop everything else to look after Steve when he's sick, and he'd follow Steve to the ends of the earth without question.

Even if Steve doesn't feel the same way.

"Aw, jeez_._" Bucky scowls as Steve limps inside the orphanage. "The hell happened to _you?_"

Steve winces as Bucky goes to get a damp towel. "Hatch happened, that's what."

Bucky sits down beside him and starts dabbing at the scrapes on Steve's face. Steve breathes in sharply and flinches back, trying to bat away Bucky's hand. "Shoot, Bucky, I can take care of myself."

"Then don't get mixed up in something without me around next time, you big moron." Bucky grabs him by the shoulder and forces him to hold still. "You're gonna keep ruining your good looks."

Steve snorts. "What good looks? No girl's ever gonna give me the time of day."

Bucky's hand stops, but he forces himself to keep going. "Well, maybe you just gotta wait for the right...person to come along," he tries.

"Easy for you to say," Steve huffs. "I think half the girls in the orphanage have a crush on you."

Bucky tries to smile, stretching it painfully wide across his face to try to hide his slowly cracking heart. "Sorry."

Steve turns to look at him. "Gee, are you actually _apologizing_ for something that's not your fault?"

Bucky hits him with the towel. "Hey, I was feeling bad for you, you punk."

"Jerk," Steve says, smiling.

Bucky forces laughter out through his lungs, even though it burns his throat and tastes like ashes. He knows then that he can never tell a soul, Steve least of all.

* * *

Over the years, Bucky takes the emotions that hum under his skin and force them down deep, where no one will ever see them.

But it's hard, so hard. When Steve is talking about the drawings he did for work with a light in his eyes, or when he thanks Bucky for getting his cold medicine in a soft voice, Bucky's heart aches with a dull pain in his chest. He covers it up with empty grins and hollow laughter, but he has to reel his enthusiasm in, make sure his fingers don't linger when he brushes something off Steve's shoulder, resist the urge to wipe away the wrinkle between Steve's brow when he's worrying over nothing.

He tries to distract himself by looking for pretty girls, and even setting up double dates for himself and Steve. They never work, because though he can laugh and dance and have a good time, it's never the same. He hates the look of disappointment on their faces when he walks away, but he just can't feel the same way about them as he does with Steve.

And it hurts, but he thinks to himself that as long as he can look after Steve when he's sick, as long as they can go drinking in bars together after a long day of work, it's enough for him.

* * *

Then the war comes to America, and one day Bucky gets a letter in the mail that makes his heart stop.

He frantically tries to apply for conscientious objector status. He's denied.

He stamps down the fear that threatens to overwhelm him and tells himself that everything is going to be fine. He's going to go to Europe, shoot some Nazis, then come back home to Steve and everything is going to be _fine._

Steve's the one who actually wants to enlist, but he can't, because he's too sickly and small. And though he knows it crushes Steve, secretly, Bucky's glad. Glad because it means Steve doesn't have to die in some godforsaken battlefield, shot to pieces by a German machine gun; it means Steve can stay home. _Safe._

* * *

Bucky fights Zola's procedures all the way. Even when it feels like he's having acid pumped into his veins and being burned alive inside by a chemical blaze, he grits his teeth and refuses to succumb to the pain. He pictures Steve's face in his mind and he thinks _goddammit, I didn't make it all the way over here just to die._

He recites his rank and number over and over again until they've lost all meaning to him, until in his pain-and-drug addled haze suddenly someone's exclaiming "Bucky! Oh my God…" and ripping the restraints off him. He turns his head, but he can't quite believe who's there next to him, looking familiar and literally larger than life.

"Is...is that…?"

"It's me. Steve."

"Steve," he repeats dumbly, a smile breaking out across his face in spite of the pain. And in that moment, he doesn't care what he's been through; all he cares about is that Steve is _here_.

* * *

To be honest, he's not terribly certain that he isn't hallucinating the entire thing. Or maybe his sanity has finally snapped after all of Zola's crazy experiments, and this is what his mind comes up with: Steve, Steve Rogers from Brooklyn, has become muscular, six-foot-tall Captain America and somehow crossed an entire ocean to rescue him from HYDRA. They try to find a way out as the factory blows up around them, except they run into a guy who pulls his face off to reveal a red skull, and at that point Bucky gives up trying to make sense of anything.

But then he's inching his way across a metal beam to the catwalk on the other side of the room, and that metal beam's shuddering and screeching underneath his feet, and that's when Bucky decides this must be real because he definitely doesn't want to fall to a fiery death fifty feet below. He jumps just as the beam gives way, but now Steve's trapped on the other side.

"There's gotta be a rope or something!" Bucky yells across the blazing chasm.

"Just go!" Steve shouts. "Get out of here!"

"No! Not without you!" Bucky shouts back before he can even think, because there's no way in hell he'll leave Steve behind to die in the inferno. They're escaping together, or not at all.

Steve backs up on the catwalk, looking a little resigned and incredibly doubtful. Bucky clenches the metal railing underneath his fingers until it hurts, and though he's never been as religious as he should have been, in that instant he prays desperately for a miracle.

It's a good thing Captain America counts as a miracle.

* * *

When they get back to the Allied camp and he sees everyone cheering for Steve, that's when it really, truly hits him: that now, Steve's Captain America, and Captain America doesn't _need_ plain old James Buchanan Barnes.

The thought hits him like a sucker punch to the gut and knocks all the air from his lungs. It takes the lump of painful adoration that's resided in his chest for years and drives a fistful of nails through it. Because all these years, he's clung to his role as Steve's protector, his supporter, his best (and only) friend as the balm for his pining heart. And now, now he doesn't even have that anymore.

He takes the pain and swallows it, the same way he's done for years and years, plastering a smile on his face like a bandage. He tells himself that he's worrying for nothing; that if Steve insisted on wading through a Hydra camp even though he had his cushy Captain America job, there's no way Steve would just up and leave for better company.

And it's true, because Steve might have a different body now, but he is still the same. Same furrow between his brows when he's thinking real hard about something; same tension between his shoulders when he's uneasy; same smile that spreads with the slow brilliance of a sunrise. The only thing that's different is the new confidence and purpose in his stride and posture, and the new air of natural authority in his voice when he gives orders. What _hadn't_ changed was his sense of loyalty.

Steve asks Bucky if he wants to join their special tactical squad, but really, he doesn't have to ask. Bucky would've followed Steve to the ends of the earth, not because he's Captain America, but because he's Steve Rogers, the kid whose heart was always bigger than his body, the boy who was always a beacon of kindness and optimism, the man Bucky Barnes has always loved.

Bucky is only a soldier in the Allied army, one of many. To the higher-ups, he's just another name and serial number in a faceless mass, a weapon they trained but saw as disposable. But when he's fighting with Steve, when he's perched on a hill with his eye behind a sniper scope and watching Steve's back, he doesn't care. He may be a weapon, but as long as he can protect the person who matters most to him in the world, it's enough for him.

* * *

It takes him maybe a bit longer than it should to realize that Steve likes Peggy Carter. Once he realizes it, it becomes so obvious: the way Steve's eyes follow her around, the way he seems to stand a little straighter when she passes by.

Bucky starts to dislike Peggy, but he doesn't know why. There's nothing wrong with her, really. She's smart, tough, capable. A fine agent. And yet he can't _stand_ it when Steve says something nice about her.

They're kicking back at an Allied base with some scotch before a mission when Steve mentions that the plan for taking out the next Hydra base was Peggy's idea, and Bucky's mood immediately sours.

"_I_ could've thought of that," he mutters darkly into his drink.

Steve doesn't answer, and when Bucky raises his eyes to him, he realizes Steve is grinning.

"What?" he grumbles.

"Are you jealous?" Steve asks teasingly.

_No, of course not,_ Bucky is about to retort, but Steve's words suddenly hit him and sink like a stone. He _is_ jealous—jealous that Steve will never look at him the same way he looks at her.

"Nah," he says, trying to loosen the knot in his throat, trying to sound nonchalant. "It's just that you already sound like you're married."

And now it's Steve's turn to frown. "_What?_"

Bucky has to laugh at Steve's expression. He stretches his mouth into a smile so wide it hurts his face. "I'm just saying, when you move into one of those nice little houses with a lawn and have Steve Jr. running around—"

"Seriously, Bucky, _stop._"

Bucky laughs again, trying to pretend the laughter doesn't feel like powdered glass in his throat. He takes a long swig from his bottle and locks his emotions in a tiny little box, pushing them to the far corner of his mind. The next day, he focuses on taking out Hydra and watching Steve's back, the same as he always does.

_This is enough,_ he reminds himself, repeating it over and over to make himself believe. _This is enough._

* * *

"What are you thinking about?"

Bucky turns his head to see Steve coming to sit next to him. The rest of the Howling Commandos are asleep, and it's just the two of them alone with the night wind whistling through the trees.

"The train idea. It sounds a bit risky."

"It's the only way we're going to nail Zola," Steve points out.

Bucky shrugs. "There'll be other chances."

Steve looks at him. "We're gonna get him, Bucky," he says, and there's a cool conviction to his voice that Bucky hasn't heard before. "He can't get away, not after everything he did...especially to you."

Bucky's head jerks up. And even after all this time, he has to fight to keep down the emotions that are struggling to rise to the surface; he has to fight to keep himself from reaching out to Steve.

"I'd like to see him in a jail cell too, but there are easier ways to get him," he says carefully.

Steve raises an eyebrow. "Are you scared?"

Bucky snorts. "You may be Captain America, but you're not invincible, Steve."

And that's the reason, really. Everyone else might see Steve as superhuman, but to Bucky he's all too mortal, still just one step away from the frail boy he used to be.

"Bucky—" Steve pauses. "When I went to that first Hydra camp...it was because of you."

Bucky's breath catches in his throat. It's never been harder for him to keep still, to quell the words he wants to say until they turn into jagged shards that slide down his throat and cut his heart into little bleeding pieces.

"What?" he says, his voice less light and more hoarse than he would've liked. "I thought you thought I was dead by that point."

Steve looks off into the distance. "That's what they said, but...I couldn't accept it. I just couldn't."

"Well, here I am," Bucky says, awkwardly patting Steve on the shoulder. (He wants to do more, but he catches himself, pulls his trembling fingers back.) "You don't have to worry about losing me, Steve."

Steve tries to smile. "I know, Bucky. I know."

* * *

There's a brief moment between when the railing rips from the train and when he hits the ice, a moment he has to think.

Most of all, he's sorry.

He already sees the expression of horrified guilt on Steve's face, and he wants to tell Steve that it's not his fault, but the wind carries his words away, and he's sorry.

He's sorry they couldn't have more time together.

He's sorry he didn't get to say goodbye.

And he's sorry he didn't have one last chance to say _I love you,_ no matter what Steve would've felt about it, because it's true. He's always loved Steve, loved him so damn much, and he just—wishes—

* * *

There is a moment of intense, blinding pain.

And then, for a long time, there is nothing.

* * *

He is drowning in a cold, suffocating, dreamless black sea.

When he wakes up again to bleak reality, he has the vague impression that he's been awake before, because his head really hurts and he feels a distinct sense of _loss._ But he can't remember what he'd lost, and so he goes along with them, following every order he's given, because he has nothing else to hold on to.

He doesn't feel anything. The Winter Soldier, they call him, and it seems like an apt name. His heart and mind are a white, frozen wasteland that nothing can touch, let alone melt. He kills, he interrogates, he watches blood splatter on floors and walls and he feels nothing.

Except sometimes, rarely, he starts to thaw and actually think, and _feel_. It's always like waking up from a trance: everything feels too real, too harsh all of a sudden. He blindly tries to grasp some sense of continuity, but his brain is scrambled, his memories are fragmented, and he can't put the pieces of himself back together…

He's standing in a bathroom, washing blood off his face when he stares at the mirror. The hollow-eyed reflection that stares back at him has the face of a stranger. And suddenly he feels so empty it _hurts_, it shatters his numb, frozen block of a heart until he wants to curl up on the tile floor and scream and cry. Because he doesn't know why he feels so angry and helpless and _wrong…_

He's on a train, then on a bus, then in New York City with little idea of why he's there except he _has_ to be. He's standing in a crowd and the loneliness is so thick in his lungs he feels like he's drowning again. Everything is too bright, too fast, but there's also a painful yearning in his chest, as though this is the place where he'll find what he can't remember losing. He thinks he recalls a name, can almost taste it on the tip of his tongue. But then they find him, and they take him away, and they return him to nothingness…

There's a little girl screaming, screaming so hard he feels like his ears are being stabbed over and over. She's crying over a bloody corpse in the dark, dirty alley, her tears falling to the ground and mingling with the crimson stains on the ground. He's standing there blankly with a knife in his hand and blood on the blade and blood on his hands and—and God, what the _hell_ is he doing? He doesn't want this, he didn't want to hurt anyone, but he just can't...can't remember...

And then he's sent on a mission in America, but even though he's the best asset HYDRA has, this one doesn't go as planned. The man he had been sent to kill—this Captain America—almost starts crying when he sees him standing there on the helicarrier. Not out of fear, but out of _joy_.

It confuses him, and he doesn't like being confused.

"Bucky," Captain America says, his mouth quivering. He takes off his helmet and drops it to the floor, revealing blond hair and blue eyes, shining brighter than the sky. "It's me, Steve."

"Who the hell is Bucky?" is his response. But there's something vaguely familiar about this _Steve,_ a memory of sweetness mixed with sorrow and pain.

He doesn't want to think about it. It's been so long since he's felt anything. Instead, he snarls and raises his guns to shoot Captain America dead.

Captain America dodges—actually _dodges_—his bullets. For a while they fight hand-to-hand, strength evenly matched, but Captain America is wasting energy yelling in his face.

"Remember who you are, Bucky! You're _better_ than this, than the person they turned you into!"

"I think you're confusing me with someone who gives a damn what you think!" he snaps. There's a little voice in the back of his head that wonders why he feels so _angry_.

A jolt of pain flares in his neck, and his fingers start to become numb as he realized Captain America just stabbed him with a sedative. The last thing he remembers, before the darkness covers his vision, is the sight of those blue eyes and a mournful whisper.

"I'm sorry, Bucky."

* * *

Waking up is agony.

Feeling returns to him like thousands of needles jabbing every inch of his skin. Everything hurts, and his head feels like it's about to split open.

"Bucky?" a soft voice inquires.

Bucky turns his head. The bright spots in his vision start to settle into stark white walls and bleached fluorescent lights, and he sees Steve's face hovering nearby, with red-rimmed eyes and an expression of concern.

"Steve?" he whispers hoarsely, reaching out with a trembling hand.

And that is when he realizes he _remembers._ Everything. How they'd grown up together, two misfit orphans in Brooklyn. How he'd gone to war, and Steve showed up bigger and stronger with an experimental serum pulsing through his veins. How HYDRA had revived him, and how he'd tried to kill Steve…

He snatches his hand back as he recoils, but Steve catches it. "It's okay, Bucky. I've got you. Everything's going to be okay."

Bucky's world is falling apart. Those years of frozen numbness break apart as he's hit all at once with the horror of everything he'd done, all the blood he'd spilled. And he'd tried to kill Steve…

Steve pulls him close and wraps an arm around his shoulders. It takes him a moment too long to realize he's crying, his face buried in the soft fabric of Steve's T-shirt.

"You're home, Bucky. You're _safe_," Steve murmurs soothingly. "Everything's going to be okay, I promise…"

* * *

Bucky is a wreck.

He's forced to go through all sorts of psychiatric evaluations, courtesy of SHIELD, and they throw around a lot of fancy words like _amnesia, brainwashing, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression._ None of that really matters to him; all he knows is that he's a wreck, a shattered shell of a man who can barely hold himself together.

He's kept in a little room (basically a cell, but nicer) with nothing sharp or pointy, so he has to ask Steve to let him borrow scissors so he can hack off his too-long hair, and then a steel sponge so he can buff off the red star on his metal arm. Just the sight of it makes him nauseous, reminds him of how _long_ he's been kept as property by Hydra and the things they'd made him do...

The only constant in his life anymore is Steve, and _God,_ he wants so badly to tell Steve how much he's missed him, how happy he is to see him again. But at the same time, he remembers how he'd tried to kill Steve, and he remembers all of the horrible things he's done, and there's not a doubt in his mind that if Steve didn't like him _that way_ before, he never would now.

SHIELD finally lets him go, though he's sure they'll be surveilling him for a long time (he sees it in their eyes, the way they don't trust him not to revert back to the Winter Soldier, the disbelieving shock they have to hide when Steve vouches wholeheartedly for him). And Steve, Steve with his goddamned bleeding heart, _insists_ that he move in, and while half of him leaps at the suggestion, the other half wants to run the hell away.

He doesn't run. But it's a close call.

And so he finds himself sitting at a dinner table in Steve's apartment, staring across it as Steve's putting some white boxes on the table and talking about a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place nearby with the best takeout. The words wash over him; he doesn't pay attention to the meaning so much as the way Steve's voice swells and dips.

Then Steve suddenly stops talking, and the silence rocks him with the force of a gunshot. He looks up from his food, blinking, and notices Steve staring down at the table with an unreadable expression on his face.

"Okay," Bucky tries, "I'll admit you lost me back at how wontons are made. How does it work again?"

Steve still doesn't respond.

"Steve?" he prompts, his voice rising just a little.

"I just—I—" Steve looks up at him, his expression full of crushing guilt. "You...I told you about how I ended up frozen for seventy years, right? When I crashed Schmidt's plane in the ice?"

Bucky nods, uncertain of where this is going. _You just about killed yourself, you idiot,_ he wants to say, but he bites the words back.

Steve stares back down at the table. "I think...I think part of me just didn't want to survive anymore."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Bucky's voice is too harsh, too raspy.

Steve sounds shattered. "It was my fault you fell from that train. If only I reached further—"

"Steve, _stop_." And Bucky's voice is still sharp, but also calm somehow. "There wasn't anything you could've done. It _wasn't your fault,_ okay? And if you ever say you felt so bad about me you tried to kill yourself, I swear to God I'll—"

"You would've done the same, if it was you," Steve says in a quiet, muffled voice.

Bucky wants to protest, wants to tell him _no,_ because throwing away his life is most goddamned stupid idea he's ever heard, but he can't say it. Bucky can't say it, because for him, it would be a lie; he would've done _exactly_ the same. Hell, he probably would've lost his mind and tried to jump off the nearest cliff.

"Yeah, but that's because—because—" He flounders, and finally bursts out in exasperation, "This isn't about me, dammit!"

"Yes, it is," and oh God, Steve's crying, he's actually _crying_, and Bucky can't stand to see him this way. Without even thinking, he reaches over to brush the tears away.

"Goddammit, Steve, _I'm_ the guilty one here!" he croaks, his voice cracking. "You have no damn right to feel bad because of me, not after everything I've done, everything I did to you—"

Steve cuts him off, pulls him into a crushing hug. He can feel Steve's tears soaking through his shoulder, and Bucky bites down to muffle a sob in his throat.

"I missed you, Bucky," Steve mumbles. "I've missed you so much."

"Steve—"

He should say it, he should just _say_ it, he should free the three-word cage that he's kept locked up for so many years, but he can't. He can't, because he's a damned coward, and after everything else he's screwed up, he can't bear awkwardness and rejection on top of all that. What he has, it's already enough. He doesn't need more. He doesn't _deserve_ more.

"I've missed you too," he says instead, his voice thick with the words he has to fight to keep himself from speaking.

He tells himself that what he said was enough.

* * *

Bucky expected things to be bad, but he didn't think they would be _this_ bad.

"You're not okay, Bucky," Steve says one night, after a particularly bad dream woke them both up at one in the morning and now they're sitting opposite each other at the dining table.

Bucky rubs his stinging, bleary eyes. He can still hear the ghostly echoes of Steve's screams from his nightmares, can still feel Steve's bones shattering beneath his fist. Dreams like this, where he's trying to kill Steve again, are the worst, and he feels so strung out and raw from the effort of holding back tears.

"Stop worrying about me," he snaps, his voice ragged. He can see the way Steve's knuckles clench around his coffee cup and his frown wrinkles are starting to etch themselves permanently in his face in the mornings. And right now, Bucky hates himself, _loathes_ himself for everything he's done and for dragging Steve into his mess on top of it all.

He takes a long sip of coffee (goddamned_ coffee,_ he thinks, because Steve won't buy alcohol for him), because he can't stand to look at Steve's face, but he can feel Steve's concern boring into him like a drill.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Bucky stares at him. He traces every wrinkle and crease in Steve's expression with his eyes, traces what he won't allow himself to reach out and touch, and with the caffeine wiring him up, he's such a balled-up tangle of rage and horror and love and fear and pain and self-hatred that something finally cracks.

"No," he says hoarsely, "no, I _don't_ want to talk about it, Steve. I don't want to talk about how I'm still trying to kill you in my dreams every night. I don't want to talk about all the people I've killed and tortured, because you'll hate me, hell, you should _already_ hate me, you _know_ what happened in DC—because I was supposed to always be there for you and have your back but instead I managed to get himself brainwashed into trying to kill the only person I ever loved, and what kind of person am I, huh? How did they manage to take me and twist me into this—this soulless _weapon?_ Because it never would've happened to you, you never would've sunk that low, you would've found a way to break out of it somehow but _I couldn't_, and that's why I'm not okay, Steve, because _I let this happen._"

He presses the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying to hold back the tears before they can chafe his eyes and cheeks for what was probably the tenth time that week.

"It's no use," he mumbles down into his coffee cup. "I don't even know why you bother...would be easier if you just walked away, y'know…"

It's quiet for a long minute. When Steve finally speaks, his voice is quiet and slow.

"Why didn't you ever tell me you loved me?"

Bucky jerks up and stares. There's a brief moment of panic surging through him, because he doesn't remember saying that, after so many years of hiding and biting back his tongue it must have slipped out during his rambling speech (_goddamned coffee_). But Steve is looking back at him with an expression only of puzzlement, not hostility.

"Wuh...I...uh…"

It's too late now for him to go back and deny what he said. He swallows the bitter taste of caffeine that lingers in the back of his mouth and frantically tries to figure out something semi-coherent to say.

"I...I don't know," he mutters to the coffee dredges in his mug. "It just...never felt right...besides, you had Agent Carter...doesn't matter anyway…"

He hears the scrape of a chair against the floor, and when he raises his head, he realizes Steve has moved from his place opposite Bucky to sit next to him instead. And panic spikes through Bucky again, because Steve's too close now…

"Bucky," Steve says softly, "I'm so sorry. I didn't know."

Bucky clenches the fabric of his pants with both fists. "Yeah, well, now you know," he spits out. "I wasn't—I never would've said anything if—"

But the words die in his throat, because just then Steve's arm wraps around him and pulls him close, until his head is resting on Steve's shoulder.

"What…what are you doing?" Bucky stammers, half fear, half hope.

He hears a shaky smile in Steve's voice. "I just...I didn't know how you'd react until you came out and said it."

Bucky inhales sharply. "You...too?" he almost whispers.

"Yeah," Steve whispers back. "But it took me a while to figure it out."

Bucky reaches up and trails his fingers up the side of Steve's face, the way he's wanted to do for so long. "You _punk,_" he murmurs, but he's smiling now, he's smiling and he doesn't know if he'll ever be able to stop.

* * *

"You didn't let it happen."

They've spent the last hour or so lying in Steve's bed, just huddling together under the blanket and breathing in each other's presence. Bucky'd thought Steve had fallen asleep, but evidently not.

"Hm?"

Steve leans closer until their foreheads are touching. "What happened wasn't your fault," he says. "Brainwashing...it's scary stuff. There's no way _anyone_ could just 'break out' of it."

Bucky closes his eyes. "Yeah," he says half-heartedly. He's still not sure if he'll ever forgive himself.

"It wasn't your fault," Steve repeats.

"You just said that."

"I'll keep saying it until you believe me."

Bucky hmms, but he's not in the mood to argue, not now. Instead, he says, after a pause, "D'you think there's something different about us?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean…" Bucky shrugs. "Aren't people in love supposed to, you know?"

Steve considers this. "I think there's a word for people like us, now."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

Bucky wants to ask, but he decides to wait until tomorrow. After all, they have time.

"We're gonna get through this," Steve says, with the same calm assurance Bucky remembers from their World War II days. "We'll make it. Together."

Bucky's not sure he has the same optimism that Steve has, but when Steve says it, he believes him. They'll get through it.

Together.

_fin._


End file.
